Old Attics

Our home was originally a two story log cabin built back in the late 1870's or 1880's. The above photo is a view of the attic over the original cabin portion of the house. The horizontal supports are logs, and vertical pieces of milled lumber have been used to support the roof. The floor of the attic you see in the photograph is really the ceiling of the room below. I walk on the logs when I have to get around in the attic. I don't think the floor/ceiling would support my weight. In some areas you can stand in the attic and look down into the room below. As you might imagine, we lose quite a bit of heat in the winter time. Insulating the attic is high on our to-do list. Until now we had other, more pressing winterizing to do, but the attic is next.


There are a lot of old mud dauber (or mud dobber, as I thought when I was younger) nests in the attic. There is also a small amount of inherited junk, like this bit of bed frame. The bees get in easily because the roof comes down above the walls but does not touch the walls. There is a completely open gap to the outside, like you'd have on a shed where the roof sits on rafters and the trusses sit on the walls. I looked up roof construction and I think our roof was constructed without a fascia. We have a soffit and the gap is above that.

I've been up there when it was raining (moving bowls around under a couple of leaks we have) and it's a wonderful place to be when it rains. You can feel the moisture in the air and see the rain dripping off the roof into the rain gutters. Of course you can hear the rain falling really well, too.

The roof of the house is made of the wood planks. I guess it's about 1x6 or 1x8, I haven't really paid attention. Above the wood is the metal roof. There's no sheathing, no insulation, no felt, no plywood or particle board or anything like that. Just milled lumber and then metal. Some places you can see the metal where a knot has fallen out of a knot hole.


On the left is a stove pipe for our wood burning stove. In front of that is an older chimney structure. I don't know when that would date to, but it's cool and interesting looking and will eventually provide clues about the development of our house. On the right way in the background is a huge paper wasp nest. I didn't even notice it was back there until I took this photograph with a flash and noticed it in the photo. Click on any of the photos for a larger view.